Metadata is most useful when the information it contains is structured and standardised so that machine evaluation is possible. Standards are important tool in the context of scientific metadata, with domain-specific standards that precisely fit the requirements of the respective scientific discipline and the type of data described being the best choice.
Developing such domain-specific standards and introducing them in the respective scientific communities is one of the tasks in which the consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) are active. One example is Metadata4Ing developed within NFDI4Ing. This semantic vocabulary allows a flexible description of process-based research and can be used in engineering and related disciplines.